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Old-School UV Mapping
Forword Rather than using a tool such as DeepUV to generate texture maps you can, if you prefer, use a more long-winded "old-school" method such as the one outlined below. Introduction Okay - so we've built our model, now it's time to skin this little critter, someone hand me a jack-knife...! Actually for any of those confused by my lame humour I mean skin as in create and map a texture onto our model but as we'll be effectively cutting and flattening out our creature any experience in taxidermy or backwoodsmanship wouldn't go amiss. Again knowledge is assumed... Use whatever methods/software you prefer... blah, blah, blah! align=left16/imgalign=right17/imgSo here is our Tove, as you can see I've just plopped a checked texture onto him, this can be very handy as it helps you to see how the texture's going on i.e. what sort of alignment/orientation/scaling you're getting, this is our prototexture and will serve as the basis for our texturing so it's 256*256 pixels, remember textures for games should always be sized by powers of 2 such as 64, 128, 256, 512 and so on. The next step is to either generate a set of texture co-ordinates from which to paint our texture or to paint a texture and then stretch it over our model and spend a good few hours tugging texture co-ordinates around to fit, personally I prefer the former and that is the type of method I shall go into here. There are a lot of different methods for generating co-ordinates and then getting the texture to fit, some are very simple and fall down on all but the most basic of shapes, others are ridiculously convoluted and quite frankly not worth the effort. There is also a wide range of tools to help you do this such as Deep Paint 3D which actually allows you to paint directly onto your 3D model using a virtual set of tools, having tried this package out my opinion is that it sounds easier to do than it is but don't let that deter you if you wish to try it, many artists do use it to spectacular effect. The method I shall present here uses only 3DS MAX and Photoshop, or equivalent packages, as with most methods there is a certain amount of toing and froing involved but in my experience that's unavoidable. This method is of my own devising but is largely based on The Steed Method, as presented by Paul Steed in the book Modelling a Character in 3DS MAX, which in turn Paul Steed based on other methods he had learned from other modellers. In short the method comprises flattening out your model in MAX, applying a flat planar map to it, locking those co-ordinates and then reinflating the model. This way you end up with a 3D model with a simple 2D texture wrapped neatly and evenly over its surface. Stage 3: Texturing Let's get stuck in, first hit your model with an EditMesh modifier even if you just finished with EditMesh it's vital that you apply another one! Now in EditMesh sub-object mode and using what ever methods you prefer flatten out your mesh, I'm talking road-kill flat here, you want to get your mesh so that most of your polygons are still joined onto their adjacent polys and are of a comparable size and shape to their original form but are facing more-or-less forward. It's also not a bad idea to fit your creatures bits into a nice square area wherever possible at this stage, that way you minimise wasted texture space. This can be achieved by squashing your model with the scale tool and then dragging your vertices out to an appropriate shape or by detaching faces turning them head on and then welding them back on or a combination of these or any other methods, just don't delete or add anything at this stage. If your model has symmetrical detail and requires symmetrical texturing, like our Tove which is almost completely symmetrical, simply layer one side of the model on top of the other but with it's polys facing backward. Once you're happy that your creature's flat exit whatever sub-object editing mode you may be in and slap on a UVW map modifier using planar mapping and Bitmap Fit it to our prototexture. Now slap on a UVW unwrap modifier this serves the twofold purpose of locking the texture co-ordinates you just applied, so that when you reinflate your mesh the texture co-ordinates don't slip, and allowing you to extract a graphical representation of your texture co-ordinates which we'll do now. Hit the Edit... button under the Parameters heading in the UVW unwrap modifier panel you should see an image somewhat like my picture here. Screen grab this image, save it at 256*256 with your paint package and then apply it back as a texture onto your model. Now comes the moment of truth, its time to reinflate! this is done by simply hopping down the stack to the point at which we applied our crucial EditMesh and turning it off, just hit the little light bulb next to its entry in the stack and watch your model spring back to its proper shape with our new reference texture hopefully nicely mapped on but this is more than just eye-candy. What we're looking for here are distortions, blurry areas, any signs that your final texture will look ropey when applied and that you need to skip down the stack to our EditMesh, turn it back on and adjust faces so they are closer to their original and final size and shape. Note the area around the Tove's nose, these are the sort of distortions I'm talking about but here they don't matter because the whole nose of the Tove will be completely black and hence no distortions will show. Once you're happy that distortions have been minimised it's time to break out your paint package/photo editing suite/poster paints and wax crayons, whatever your preferred medium, and paint your texture over the top of our reference texture. tipAlways paint your texture at at least twice it's final size./tip If you use Photoshop like I do then try to keep everything on separate layers as if you get your texture right first time I'll proverbially eat my proverbial hat! Regularly try your texture out on the model to see how it looks and if everything is in the right place, as you can no doubt imagine these things don't always look the same on. Category:Modelling Category:Tutorials